Join Us on FB

EVENTS

Matt and I did the show today, and though there weren’t any theist callers of note (we think the one we got might have been a weak troll), we had at least one feisty call with an atheist viewer, who tried to make an argument in favor of allowing creationism to be taught in schools. As you’ll see in the episode, we thought his whole argument was informed by a naivety in thinking that students who were only at an introductory stage in their education would be able to evaluate (and do so correctly) creationism’s claims without first having an actual grounding in the basics of skepticism and critical thinking (which I sure as hell wasn’t given in junior high or high school). It was essentially a recapitulation of the “equal time” arguments creationists themselves have attempted to use down the years, except the caller thought that science and evolution would benefit from it.

Here’s the formula: Wholesome Christian boy meets professor. Professor mocks boy. Boy stands up for Christianity. Boy humiliates professor. Atheist looks stupid. The end. It’s great for a thirty second anecdote, but if you use your

A deist emailed us this week with a message for Christians and a request that we read his message on The Atheist Experience. I won’t take up air time for that, as I explain in my response to him, but I did think it was valuable as a discussion topic about why we reject deism as well as other flavors of theism.

For reference, deism is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of a creator. Deists generally reject organized religion (with some exceptions) and divine revelation as a source of knowledge about the nature of God.

Now, on to the deist’s message. I’ve left the spelling, capitalization, and punctuation as it is in the original.

“It was before one of our meetings, as we were preparing and praying, when Gary, who sang bass in the quartet and whose turn it was to preach that night, whispered to us that he had lost his voice and was unable to sing or talk. We gathered in a circle around Gary and laid our hands on his shoulders, and I prayed out loud for God to heal Gary’s voice, ending with the words ‘Gary, in the name of Jesus, be healed!’

“Gary looked up and yelled, ‘Praise the Lord!’ in a strong voice. He went on to sing and preach that night.”

Now, granted, this story is still interesting. But quite often people do in fact recover from a sore throat, without divine intervention. Without the detail that Gary is actually “mute,” it’s very much in the realm of what the placebo effect alone can pull off. Not particularly miraculous in this sense.

I haven’t read much into the Luke Muehlhauser story yet, so if anybody has any points to make, discuss away.

Today I will probably briefly touch on an Islam 101 seminar that was hosted by the local Islamic Community Center. I attended with Beth and Russell and some other ACA folks. We’re going to put together a more detailed blog article describing our individual thoughts and reactions to the seminar that will be posted here later. So, I probably won’t be going into great detail, since that is “to come.”

I also want to hit confirmation bias a bit and talk a little about how it impacts the apologetic worldview and also how it can corrupt research studies as well.

And finally, we’ll get to the ever-popular public dialog via studio phones with callers.